Saturday, April 19, 2014

I intended to love the show
Star-Crossed. Don’t get me wrong, I fully expected it to be cheesy. The
fact is, I enjoy cheese, and the show had many of the elements I enjoy in my
cheesy escapist CW viewing: cute aliens! romance! great soundtrack!
Unfortunately, the show is also taking itself way too seriously.

So far the plot is suffering from what I like
to call Season-3 disease, but the weird thing is, we’re only on episode 9.
Season 3 disease is named after two of my favorite shows, Veronica Mars
and Roswell. Both shows were awesome because of the characters in
their first two seasons (though the latter started to go off the rails in
season 2). But in their final seasons, both became very episodic and more like
cookie-cutter versions of their respective genres, mystery and SF. Star-Crossed
is already there: they’ve packed the first nine episodes full of
science-fiction nonsense, including, but not limited to: an alien plant that
cures cancer, a different version of the same alien plant (you just
change the name of it by adding the word “black”—so clever!) that kills people,
a spaceship crash, a human/alien hybrid baby, and a secret group of aliens who
are passing as humans because they’ve had their tattoos removed (more on that
last one later). Also, when they put one of these aliens in prison, they just keep them in a dry room. One thirty-something pretty alien woman came out looking like she was eighty, or maybe just an alien raisin.

Roswell had essentially
the same premise: the forbidden love between a human girl and an alien boy, but
they lost focus when they tried to go big with the sci-fi, giving the alien
race a name and a space ship powered by a diamond and all kinds of other crap,
which didn’t gel with the romantic elements they’d already put in place. The Star-Crossed
aliens already have a name, and it’s pretty moronic: they’re called Atrians,
which sounds far too much like the entrance to a building for my taste. All the
Atriums have a bunch of tattoos and they are really good swimmers, which made
Earth a pretty perfect place to crash land, I guess. Since they look like
perfectly hot human models without the tats, a bunch of rebel aliens got theirs
removed, although the marks still show up when wet, which means their entire
system of espionage can be foiled by a light drizzle.

I guess water is pretty important to this
species. There was also a scene last week in which an alien was released from
prison, where they had her all dried out. They led out a seventy-year old
alien, put her in a bathtub, and presto! She was like thirty-five and hot.
Freeze-dried aliens. So that happened.

I also can’t possibly keep track of which are
the good Vestibules and which are the bad ones, because some of them are they
are using their bad plant to kill people, which is a real bummer, because, as previously
mentioned, these alien boys are in fact super hot. The main character is named
Roman, so his parents must have known he was going to crash-land on
Earth and maybe they figured he could just pretend to be Italian. The actor
who portrays him is also thirty-one, and playing a junior in high
school, a proud Earth tradition going all the way back to Beverly Hills
90210.

According to the story, Roman is in love with
the human girl who saved him when he was a kid, but it’s hard to get fully invested
in the relationship, as the actress who’s playing her seems to have done some
training at the Kristen Stewart School of Acting. He's not bad--it's just--he's clearly not seventeen. Maybe they keep going to high school into their thirties on his homeworld. Update: so this show actually got better in its final four or five episodes of the season--so of course the CW had to cancel it. I just re-watched them in order on Netflix, just as a background show to have one while I was working on the computer, etc. And you know what, there was an inescapable element of cheese. But I'm still kind of bummed it got cancelled, because they set up one heck of a cliffhanger. I'd say if you like aliens, teen drama (and if you're old enough to remember V-human/alien baby hybrids!) this one might be worth the binge.